skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's another thread that makes the same case: these things are not old.

As far as I know, we come from clan-like nomads, varying between a alpha-male-harem model with young males on the outskirts and a pair-bonding model with young males striking out on their own. That means that those in your clan have generally had a very close and intimate view of your activities -- and you of theirs. But also that 1) clans were by necessity small, and 2) you always had the ability to walk away. Village life gets a little more complicated, but there is a span of control issue at work: you simply can only be concerned with so many things at the same time. People who are not physically near you have privacy from your oversight. In fact, much of human social behavior is about the trading of information about other people, their thoughts and behaviors. The trust engendered forms alliances and creates a communal atmosphere.

The state of nature is that I can choose to talk away from any group of humans. Once I am several hundred meters away, whatever I am doing is anonymous and private. I can choose to share something with one or a few special friends. I can choose not to share something with somebody who has offended me. And so on.

But now it's possible to be concerned with millions of things at the same time. Computers can watch millions very closely. You can't walk away from a group of humans and have privacy and anonymity. The system will track you. Your call phone, for instance, has capabilities that make it more or less something akin to a cross between a surveillance device and a wildlife tracking tag. The natural limits that draconian states have over their people are melting away. That's completely new.

So yes, we've always been social creatures, but society has been defined by the physical and natural limits on cognition and communication. What we're turning into is not just a more social version of man. It's something completely different. As the other commenter pointed out, it's really more savage than social.
I've seen financial reports from an independent artist (distributing through CDBaby). Here's the figures:

Spotify: $0.0022
Deezer: $0.0022
LastFM: $0.0005
iTunesMatch: $0.003

These vary very slightly from time to time but iTunes Match has regularly been the highest.
I've tried the app for only 5 minutes and I love it already - it's a much more elegant solution than having to use "jekyll --server -auto" and localhost:4000.
The thing that bugs me though is that the list of websites doesn't expand beyond three sites- you have to scroll to see the fourth site. Shouldn't the list dialog expand to fit all the sites?
5 Top Console Linux File Managers - Linux Links - The Linux Portal Site
ASP.NET MVC and WebAPI Tutorials
I'm curious about this line, too. I wonder if it's maybe just a wee joke
I've experienced the service differently. I'm more old school. Spotify does not give me the feeling to be the master of my library and that this music belongs to me.

I'm more happy with buying albums I love and archiving them. So, I'm looking forward to the new iTunes, I hope it combines the old way with the new way in new ways.

But Spotify has to work more on discoverability of new artists and music. I'm not convinced by there app.
Don’t Do What You Love. Do What You Are.
> I haven't met programmers who became lawyers.

For what it's worth, I'm a programmer in the middle of law school.
Programmer is like the modern villager. Villagers grew food and made stuff and that's what you ever needed. The programmer writes code and everything in our civilization is already code or it will be.

Therefore, programmer is a much broader occupation than almost any other. It's still a seller's marker because of that. Look at everything around you, and while there is at least one item that doesn't execute code inside, we haven't hit peak coder yet.
I'm sure sitting on your ass 8-10 hours a day is a health risk. Maybe not as bad as working in a factory breathing in nasty chemicals all day, or dodging falling trees as a lumberjack, but a health risk nonetheless.
Do you really think the labels wouldn't increase their price by 25% then? They already think they get way too little money from these services. That's why they're taking all the money they can get. If Spotify increases the monthly price to $20, the labels would probably ask for $19.5 of it.
Bing may be marginally better than Google. It's certainly possible that it is.

But marginally better doesn't matter much, which is why I was careful to say "notably" better.

Search now is nothing like what it will be in a decade, and someone is going to make that leap. Might be Google, might not.

What happens when someone makes that quantum leap in delivering the information you want?

If it's not Google, the ad network disintegrates at least as fast as the search users vanish.

I would argue that Youtube has the most lock-in of any Google product, with Gmail second. Neither is invulnerable, but Youtube in particular will be hard to pull folks away from. Moving video around is tedious, and people largely just won't do it.
Whitewashing and cheerleading a legacy of genocide, rape, enslavement, and the theft of land and resources is "bad", yes. Further, establishing the history of the conquerors as the dominant narrative is a time honored tradition for stamping out native history, language, culture, and values.

e.g. In the US there is no "white history month" because EVERY month is white history month, white history is simply called "history" and is treated as a norm with only token attention paid to what lies outside it. This establishes an unconscious acceptance of white superiority and historical priority in both white and students of color and is a cornerstone of systemic white privilege.
Because they were ethic-less thieves?
What's really depressing is that Apple's App Store revenue (whatever its source) comes from basically having strip mined a thriving freeware and shareware community. They did at least wait until CNET clear-cut the VersionTracker rainforest, but still.

Three years ago, a hobbyist could make an app in their free time, put it out there for cheap or free, and see what happened. If the app was any good, what would happen could easily be that they made a livable income off of their creation.

Today, that hobbyist has basically three options:

1. Pay Apple $99/year for the privilege of showing their creation to the world, and release it through the App Store. Feel their enthusiasm for the project drop as they go through that tooth-pulling process, but expect that it will all be worth it since the App Store will at least give them some good exposure. Watch as it doesn't.

2. Pay Apple $99/year for the privilege of showing their creation to the world, and release it on their own. This is a lot like the old days, except that now Apple is taxing you, and the old tools for spreading the word have largely starved.

3. Don't pay Apple a dime and release the app unsigned. Explain on the download page that the end user will have to edit their security preferences to allow unsigned apps. This looks sketchy to users, and now our hobbyist is suspected of being a criminal.
Something like this with Django (i.e run the runserver command would be tight).
... when AOL started offering access to Usenet.

(In reality, Usenet was pretty great through most of the '90s; warez killed Usenet, not newcomers).
Spotify should make it so they can make deals directly with artists and then promote them in their store, kind of like how Amazon is doing with its self-publishing platform. They are big enough now for this to work. The problem is they most likely got forced into signing a non-compete clause with the labels, and they took that deal. So now they can't do that anymore, which makes them completely dependent on the labels in the foreseeable future, and the labels can keep asking for 98% of their revenue.

And next time the labels brag about supporting innovations like Spotify (like when they did when they wanted to pass SOPA), remind them that they are what's killing innovations like Spotify, and these services usually achieve success despite them.
I'd say farming is the quintessential growth bet. : P

Most of the overhead would seem to be royalties, so reducing them by 25% may not be an option. The revenue is also determined by ad market rates, which can be cyclical, and is out of their control.
Oh I see. I misread your comment. My apologies.
The analysis in the article is breathtakingly wrong. The data used is wrong. The math used is wrong. The conclusions are wrong.

First, the article assumes each developer creates one app (160,000 * 8700 = $1.392B revenues, $1.392 * 30% = $418mil "profit"). This error leads to further errors down the line.

Second, Apple App Store sales is estimated to hit apx $4.9B 2012 [1]. This means apx $1,470mil in gross income (what the article calls "profit"). The article uses only $1.39B revenues and $418mil in gross income in its calculations as outlined in point one.

Third, this analysis assumes every developer would not purchase an iPhone if they were not developing software. Given that the vast majority of iOS developers do it part time, I think this assumption is highly unlikely.

Fourth, including profit from phones as a % of appstore profits is just wrong. Phone profits are not included as part of appstore profits. Thus it cannot be used as a % of it. It is additional income, on top of the appstore.

Finally, just to give you an idea of how little profits from developer matter... In the last 4 reported quarters, Apple earned a pre-tax net income of $49,000mil. Or $134mil per day. This versus the article's $64mil over the entire year from developers. Somehow I don't think they spend a lot of time or effort trying to get money out of developers.

[1] http://www.mediabistro.com/appnewser/apples-app-store-revenu...
Why Klout is doomed
"Oddly" missing articles on WebGL...
All this would do is a short-term depression of SF programmer wages coupled to short-term surge in worldwide programmer wages. Because guess what, smart guy in Ukraine was already employed there and when he moves the next guy coming to fill the gap will either cost more or be less smart.

Programmer talent is sparse worldwide, not just in the Valley.
There is a big difference between Amon Plus and services like AppFog. Amon Plus is self-hosted and you have to pay $24.95 once and then you own it forever. There are no monthly fees and no restrictions.
The great thing about vi[m] is that even after twenty years of using it, as my primary editor for everything (paired with LaTeX for document generation, mutt for email, etc), and much of that time spent teaching students how to effectively use it, I still sometimes learn about useful commands that I didn't know about. (Today: asterisk to jump to next occurrence of current word.)
Pushing Python Past the Present
I'm pretty sure there aren't any. And as any RSI sufferer will tell you, programming has health risks, which can even prevent you from continuing to program.
Yet Apple manages that part of the deal reasonably well. I'd say what's missing is an industry device standard a la IBM PC, such that drivers can be decoupled from the overall device development. It seems like low to midrange smartphones have experienced a race to the bottom before they were even in the position to lower the spending on software integration. I just hope that consumers are aware of this and choose devices that are based on standards set by the OS developer, such as Nexus and Windows Phone. Google has some homework to do in terms of the Nexus brand awareness if you ask me.
It's IE-sponsored, that isn't a terribly big surprise.
You seem to have "good writing". Could you write a novel, with a captivating, nonobvious plot, interesting characters and a twist ending?

You probably can score ok in a math SAT. Can you visualize the mathematics of a quaternion, or formulate the equation for an n-sided betzier patch?

The work a linguistic/novelist/journalist or a mathematican is not on the highscool level. Neither is the work of a programmer.

I do believe basic programming should be taught, just like basic math and writing skills. But that has absolutely nothing to do with proffessional programming.
Do you by chance read Cal Newport's blog? or have read his recent book "So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love"
passion burns out, whereas greed is sustainable

This blog entry seems to have been written so that it can end up with this sentence and not read cynical.
MASSIVE asteroid hurtling towards earth NASA send team to intercept
Most people don't write well, even most educated people. It's not the commodity you seem to believe. The GRE/SAT test for the ability to write essays on a specified topic in the format that the GRE/SAT want. This doesn't really reflect useful writing in the real world.

Plus most people don't have great GRE/SAT scores anyway. You don't have to have outstanding scores to get into most programs. You just need decent scores.
Best quote I've read/heard all month "...but passion burns out, whereas greed is sustainable." I identified with the author and it's one of the major reasons I didn't pursue other career paths even though I could have (Lawyer, Doctor etc.) Thanks for this article.
Simple Python profiler
Many do, such as Google's Dan Berlin and huge chunks of the IP law field.
Farming :-)
As everyone around here likes to quote endlessly: You can't patent an idea. What notable intellectual property did Jobs the "thief" steal?
I understood your first comment to be in relation to governmental spying and neighbors (the whole world) spying. I agree the former is a serious problem and will likely have radical consequences but the latter I think won't be a problem. There is too much noise for you and I to keep on top of all the latest rumors and whatnot. I can retain anonymity and privacy from the average person but not from the government or corporations.
Forgot to commit that to master, shall push a Procfile into the Repo and add the second line in.

Cheers :)
Sorry for the confusion, I shall put it in the description :)
Are unpaid overtime common in the States?
Pretty much.

There's also tremendous scope for working from home, or from wherever you want. I can imagine it getting to the stage where job ads for developers will advertise perks like 'work from the beach!'

I'm not a full-time developer (though my work involves programming), but I know what I want to be doing in my 30s, 40s... Not just because I like it but because it gives you so much freedom in terms of lifestyle.
My personal observation has been that the difficulty and set backs in the corporate adoption of outsourcing have not been due to the lack of capable programmers.

It has been associated with the lack of regular collaboration between the outsourcing resources and the customer. As a whole, this industry has not perfected the art of specification. An analysts with the ability to comprehensively specify software requirements is a scarcer resource than a programmer who can properly print a binary tree.

The lack of adherence to proper standards surrounding specification is generally compensated by ongoing collaboration between development teams and stake holders (hence the wide adoption of SCRUM). Separating the two entities with geographical, cultural and language barriers causes a break down in collaboration and that allows the deficiencies in specification to cause the project to fail.

I would argue that a bad team of coders with a water-tight set of requirements will have a greater chance of success than a team of rock stars with vague and incomplete requirements.
I know a programmer who became a lawyer (in Netherlands). It lifted his hourly rate 10x (50->500 EUR/hour), and while not all time is paid, and he isn't working full time having a lot of time to spare, he's getting like 2x than before.
Car insurance: why women face £300 rise in premiums
Detrimental for whom?

The changes to the cost of living are primarily a function of the now thousands of google and apple commuters. Not that that is stopping them from complaining when they wonder why moving up to a 2BR costs $4k/month now.
Good point, but I read "engineering doesn't matter" to mean you shouldn't spend a significant amount of time carefully designing a system that's likely to change. pg is absolutely correct in that sense.

My point was the amount of time required to prevent security holes like the ones outlined in the link are minimal - preventing them isn't going to stand in the way of an engineer implementing other features.
Spotify helps you be 'master of your library' by putting a file icon next to songs you have locally. It's pretty much telling you exactly what you need to download for 'backup.'
That's been the case for almost 15 years now and any sign of a clue materializing has yet to be demonstrated. Just look at Netflix's slow death spiral as its content library keeps shrinking in favor of overpriced walled gardens.

Valve is virtually the only major media company to understand that the only way to win back dollars from pirates is by offering a compelling service at fair prices.
It's not about the unit tests
>This predatory relationship has to stop if the record companies want to exist at all in the future.

There is a lot demand for their product. It's not like people are switching to something else. People still want Lady Gaga and the Beatles.
Biased opinion - Java fan dreaming about bright future of Java.
Sharetori Wants To Pay You For African Local Content 
Yes, Sharetori is a social sharing network for sub-Saharan Africa that provides support for spreading information about local business, news, video, and social causes.The aim is to amplify your social interactions.
Start-ups On Decision: Just do it or just don’t do it – it’s that simple right?
Decisions are hard. Start-up decisions are even harder. Should you target all the possible markets or should you streamline efforts? Should you build and release on a specific platform first or just wait till you build all?
Wait, does rails scaffolding turn off security by default?
It varies by month, by country, and by record label. So it's hard to give an exact figure for every artist. $0.003 is on the top end of the scale though.
ActiveRecord Reputation System Wiki
Dick Costolo of Twitter, an Improv Master Writing Its Script
That hasn't changed. You can pop a tracking number into UPS and get shipment info.
Eh, I'm an idiot. I was thinking so much about the pricing scheme I forgot it's a one-time buy, not a service.
It's good to see Microsoft investing time and resource to recognize community contributions. They should open similar platforms for Mobile, Azure, SQL and Windows Developers too. www.windowsclient.net used to be a good resource for Windows App programmers, but it's been abandoned
Oh man do I feel more and more pushed to upgrade our codebase to MVC4...
This explains why they've suddenly started spamming me with playlist updates from my FB friends...trying to crank up the virality factor in order to increase revenue.

I paid for Spotify for a few months, and thought it was nice, but I much prefer buying iTunes/Amazon music and syncing it to all of my devices via iTunes Match.

Until Spotify gets a better recommendation engine, I think they'll suffer to get revenue where they want it to be.
Towing companies provide negative value to their paying customers, but seem to make a killing.
Being able to break something =/= IT not doing their job.

Tossing a brick through a window doesn't mean that the window should have been thicker.
The reason the number in this article is interesting is that it is a compelling absurdity: the notion that Apple might make an appreciable amount of money off the average developer due to "developer on-boarding" costs as opposed to fees from selling their software.

The analysis in the (simple) article, thereby, is actually quite funny, and is part of an overall correct narrative; although, I agree that it was not described in quite the right context, and lends itself to your math complaints, which are technically quite correct.

From this standpoint, using the average developer income does not destroy the analysis (and is in fact required of it): if I were using a similar analysis in a talk, I'd want to speak to the people in the room, to give them a feel for what Apple will make from that sample.

Secondly, it is not problematic to ignore that the developer might have otherwise purchased an iPhone: the purpose of this kind of analysis isn't to demonstrate that Apple is "trying to get money out of developers", it is to demonstrate a comparison in the money made.

However, you are quite right that the math in the article is flawed: thankfully, some parts compensate by being conservative; once you take into account processing fees and other fixed costs (as various others have done), Apple's profit on the App Store is closer to 10%, not 30%.

We then get $4.9b*10%/160k, giving (conservatively, working back up towards 12%) ~$3500/developer. ($300+$99)/$3500 is >10%, which is still an interesting figure to be able to trot about at conferences (especially if you try to estimate the money spent on Macs).

(If I were to try to undermine the math in this argument, I'd probably do so from a different angle: the $99 is not pure profit, as Apple has employees scanning over the contracts and vetting corporate accounts; the fixed per-signup costs need to be removed.)

(Additionally, I question whether the average developer buys the most expensive device Apple offers, or instead purchases an iPod touch to use only for development; and then, keeps the iPod touch for longer than a year. A bi-yearly iPod touch would destroy this math.)
Unplugged Life - October 2012 Update